Relations with the United States

Throughout its history, Mexico has had an ambivalent love-hate
relationship with its northern neighbor. Nationalist rhetoric
continuously highlights the loss of one-half of Mexico's territory and
natural resources to the United States in the 1800s. Even at times when
United States-Mexican relations have been at their best, this loss is
still present in Mexican rhetoric. During the Rio Group summit in
September 1994, for example, President Salinas commented on the United
Nations-sponsored United States intervention in Haiti, "Having
suffered an external intervention by the United States, in which we lost
more than half of our territory, Mexico cannot accept any proposal for
intervention by any nation of the region." In economic terms, good
relations with the United States have long been critical for Mexico,
given that its northern neighbor is its principal trading partner, both
for exports and imports. For its part, the United States gives serious
consideration to its relations with Mexico because of Mexico's strategic
location on the United States southern border as well as the fact that
Mexico has the largest oil deposits in Latin America.

Relations between the countries often have been characterized by
conflict. Analysts attribute much of the antagonism to the great
disparities in wealth between the two countries; a history of
intervention by the United States that makes Mexico highly critical and
suspicious of United States positions; cultural differences and
stereotypes of both nations; and the high levels of interdependence on
many socioeconomic and political issues, both at the national level and
in border areas.

In the past, Mexico defied the United States on a number of crucial
hemispheric issues. Mexico never broke relations with the Cuban
communist regime as did the rest of Latin America in the early 1960s.
During President Echeverrķa's sexenio , Mexico took a leading
role in demands for a new international economic order. During the
1970s, Mexico challenged the United States position in Central America
and led a concerted regional effort that excluded the United States to
bring a peaceful end to regional conflicts. During the 1980s, Mexico was
highly critical of United States policy in El Salvador and, along with
the French government, called for formal recognition of the Salvadoran
guerrillas in the peace process.

The most important bilateral issues in the 1990s are drugs, trade,
and illegal immigration into the United States. Drug trafficking is a
pressing issue for both Mexico, as a producer and point of entry of the
drug trade from South America into the United States drug market, and
the United States, as a major consumer. Mexico insists that the
trafficking of drugs would not exist without the enormous and growing
market in the United States, thus placing responsibility on its northern
neighbor. Nevertheless, the corruption and crime provoked by the growing
drug business in Mexico have led the Mexican government to take domestic
antidrug measures. The Salinas government launched a massive military
campaign to counter the threat posed by the narcotics trade within the
country. In 1989 Mexico signed a cooperation agreement with the United
States on fighting the illegal drug trade (see President Salinas, ch.
1). Mexico's position on drug trafficking consists of two major
contentions: Mexico will make a good-faith effort to eradicate the
production and trade of drugs, and it will not, under any circumstances,
allow the consolidation of narcotics groups within its territory.
Currently, Mexico has a large portion of its army involved in the
government's drug eradication program (see Narcotics Trafficking, ch.
5).

Trade between the two nations remains an important issue. A trade and
environmental agreement signed in late 1989 paved the way for an
expansion of bilateral trade and investment with the United States. In
1990 Mexico began negotiations over NAFTA with the United States and
Canada. The main objective of NAFTA was to remove all trade barriers and
investment obstacles among the three countries over a fifteen-year
period. Negotiations concluded in 1992, and NAFTA was approved in 1993.
The agreement was activated on January 1, 1994, creating the world's
richest and largest trading bloc, consisting of 360 million consumers in
a US$6.6 trillion market.

A third pressing issue between the two countries continues to be
illegal immigration of Mexicans into the United States. By the
mid-1990s, this issue occupied center stage in United States-Mexican
relations. Since the 1960s, the number of Mexican illegal immigrants
into the United States has soared to an average of 300,000 to 500,000
per year. These groups are concentrated in the southwestern states of
the United States, especially California. Although NAFTA may help to
decrease this trend in the long run, the presence of a large number of
illegal residents in the United States--many of whom benefit from local
and federal programs--triggered a legislative proposal in 1995 in the
state of California to deprive these groups of any United States
government support. In particular, legislation in the state of
California has revived anti-United States feelings among Mexicans.